How do you learn technology?
Many of the folks often ask me this question. How do you learn technology?
When I started as a software engineer at fag end of the 90s, I was having only one skill. You guessed it right! I was only good at coding in C/C++ and have no clue of what a domain really mean. Soon I realized my limitation. Over the next few years, I was forced to learn Java, Sybase, MySQL, XML, UI, Tomcat, Tibco, UML, Design Patterns, and what not!
Those were the days of no-internet, no-Google, no-laptop … at least at my disposal. Books were the only source of knowledge. And my favorite book shop was the great Gangarams on the beautiful MG Road. For anything and everything, I used to walk in and buy a book that teaches us the technology.
I can buy and read a book. But, we do not learn technology just by reading. We need to work on it. But how? As I said, I didn’t have a powerful home PC, high-speed internet, downloadable images, etc.,
It was a problem of chicken and egg. Unless I know the technology, I do not get a chance to work on that exciting project. But, unless I get a chance to work on the project, I do not have a way to learn the technology. Good thing was that I survived … only because everyone around me was also more or less in the same soup.
Come the mid-2000s. I was having a nice laptop on Celeron. I was having decent internet connectivity. Most of the images were downloadable right from the internet, at least for trying out. Then what stops me?
I started learning Struts 2, Spring Framework, Hibernate, ActiveMQ, JSF, JBoss, and the list goes on!
Here is the secret. I have a pet project in my backyard … Employee Directory!
Instead of merely learning the syntax or APIs, I always implement the same Employee Directory application using different technologies. I built it using stacks like LAMP, WAMP, Spring/Hibernate, JQuery, GWT … later added SOAP to it and then moved on to add the REST interface. I kept on factoring the application by applying different architectural and design practices. Wrote unit tests using various frameworks to apply TDD and on a fine day, I linked it to Jenkins CI/CD.
It didn’t stop there! Currently, my cute Employee Directory is running on an AWS EC2 instance as a Docker container on the Kubernetes cluster along with MongoDB, Kafka, NodeJS, Splunk, and a host of other so-called cutting edge modern tools and technologies.
I do not wait for someone to give me a project. Rather, I have my own project. By migrating it from one stack to another, I learned the strengths and weaknesses of those stacks. I learned and unlearned the ways to design systems around a given technology. Believe me, it is the quickest way to gain command over any technology!
What stops you? Choose your project and try everything that you want to learn and stay ahead of the crowd!
